1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to an improved data processing system and more specifically to a computer implemented method, system, and computer usable program code for automatically creating configuration rule build files.
2. Description of the Related Art
Historically, product design developers or modelers had to wait for the configuration rule build process to be completed and validated prior to any configuration rule testing being possible. Also, prior to starting the configuration rule build process, several key product design developers were required to perform code review on the type of configuration rules that were to be used on a particular product design and the format or syntax of those configuration rules. These product design developers create these configuration rules regarding every aspect of a product design, such as, for example, an xSeries server is limited to including only two peripheral component interconnect extended (PCI-X) adapters.
In the current configuration rule development context, product design developers are required to manually model these configuration rules into a comma-separated values (CSV) file format before these modelers can check-in to a configuration rule build process and create configuration rule build files. The product design developers use these created configuration rule build files to test configuration rules for specific product designs in a local test client. A local test client is a web-based configuration application, which interacts with a rule engine and a runtime database for product configuration purposes.
The rule engine needs the configuration rule build files to execute the configuration rules that had already been defined by the product design developers based on requirements templates for the different product designs. These requirements templates are Microsoft® Excel® (.xls) document files, which contain part numbers or feature codes, descriptions, and rules specific to the configurations of the particular products being prototyped or modeled. A feature code is a reusable number used by the configuration system that represents a particular part number.